Book
(Hardback)

Publication History:

Criticism and Creativity

Edited by
Maria Vaccarella and Kimberly R. Myers

This series showcases innovative research, creativity and pedagogy in the interdisciplinary field of medical humanities. Books in the series explore the complexities of human bodies, minds, illness and wellbeing through analytical frameworks derived from humanistic disciplines and clinical practice. The series is intended to provide an informative exchange across disciplines, contributing to debates on health-related issues from a broad range of perspectives. In addition to research monographs and edited collections, the series includes creative works as well as pedagogical texts, thus encouraging personal and theoretical reflections on the condition of the human mind/body. The series embraces the intersection of healthcare and the humanities, in its practical, theoretical, creative and educational expressions.

The series serves as a venue for publishing a range of materials: research monographs and edited collections on critical approaches to medical issues in culture; creative works that engage with medical humanities themes, accompanied by critical and educational materials; and critical, engaged or radical pedagogies on focused topics and/or for learners in the medical humanities. The series also invites research that opens up critical conversations on being human at the intersection of other forms of new humanistic knowledge, such as environmental or digital humanities. We are especially interested in collaborations between academics in the humanities and healthcare professionals.

All book proposals and manuscripts will be peer reviewed prior to publication. We publish in both print and electronic format. Open Access publication is particularly welcome.

Series

Publication History:

Edited by
Dafydd Sills-Jones and Pietari Kääpä

This series provides a space for exploring the development of documentary film cultures in the contemporary context. The series takes an ecological approach to the study of documentary funding, production, distribution and consumption by emphasizing the interconnections between these practices and those of other media systems. It thus encourages new ways of understanding documentary films or practices as part of other, wider systems of cultural production.

Volumes may focus on specific sociopolitical environments, such as that of a nation or region. Alternatively, they may explore specific themes or production practices, such as new wave documentaries, environmentalism or indigenous film communities. Studies of shared technological platforms, including films that make use of embodied technologies or using emergent distribution platforms, are also welcome.

The series reflects not only the maturing of literature on documentary film and media production studies over the last two decades but also the growing interest amongst nonacademic and professional audiences in documentary texts as they occupy an increasingly hybrid cultural space: part journalism, part art cinema, part activism, part entertainment, part digital culture.

Publication History:

Edited by
David Manning

This new book series will show that a critical understanding of religious pluralism in the past is of vital significance to debates about identity, diversity, and co-existence in the present. Studies will focus on using a historical perspective to address one of three key themes in the period between 1500 and 2000 CE: intra-religious pluralism; inter-religious pluralism; or, religion, secularism, and the nation state. Within this frame of reference, constructive contrasts between a wide range of foci, approaches, and viewpoints will be keenly encouraged. The series will champion established lines of research in political, social, cultural, and gendered histories of religious pluralism – e.g. studies on liberty, persecution, and toleration – whilst also encouraging novel ways of transcending a scholarly discourse which is dominated by ideologies and methodologies derived from the social sciences – e.g. by studies on the theological and literary dimensions of conflict, cohesion, and community. The series will embrace scholarship on subjects from any part of the world. European and extra-European perspectives that complement traditional Anglo-American thinking are particularly welcome.

As the ‘global turn’ continues to energize new types of enquiry, the series will also seek to advance studies of indigenous and displaced religious groups. With this scope there is a reflexive acknowledgement that the rationale for and defining concepts of the series are grounded in a ‘western’ intellectual tradition; however, this should serve as a challenge to prospective authors to pioneer new dialogues between ‘western’ and ‘non-western’ approaches and foci, or even surpass the dichotomy altogether. An emphasis will be given to promoting the best research of early career scholars from around the world, whilst also giving more established academics the opportunity to develop their multimedia policy-orientated work – e.g. podcasts, blogs, talks, press briefings, reports for thinktanks, governments, and public agencies etc. – into a book that would engage peers and students alike.

Book
(Paperback)

Publication History:

Emotions, Experiences, and Meanings

Edited by
Rebecca Madgin and Nicolas Kenny

The purpose of this series is to examine the city as a lived place. Specifically, we are interested in the ways in which the city is invested with meaning through everyday lived experiences. The series is particularly interested in submissions that focus on the perceptual and felt dimensions of urban places through exploring the experiential, emotional, sensory, and affective dimensions that contribute to how people behave in, feel about, and move around in cities. Books in this series will interrogate the relationship between people and place through a focus on the diverse ways in which subjective and intimate feelings are fundamental constituents of the urban experience. We encourage authors to examine the city as a lived place from a range of different perspectives, and to be inclusive of individual and collective voices in the city to better understand the historical development and contemporary evolution of diverse urban settings.

Some of the questions we seek to explore through the series include, but are not restricted to:

How is the city experienced, by whom, and how does this change over time?

Who shapes the experience of the city and for what reasons?

How do individual and shared joy, fear, pride, nostalgia, disgust, or other emotions, shape the meanings attributed to urban spaces?

How does the lived experience of, and emotional connections to, urban places inform the way particular spaces within cities are preserved and memorialized, or alternatively demolished and redeveloped?

In what ways is our understanding of the lived experience of the city sharpened through the lens of comparative, transnational, and global approaches?

The series seeks to examine the real and the imaginary, the representational and the non-representational, the historical and the contemporary, the remembered and the recreated in all historical periods including research on the twenty-first century city. The series is open to work covering all geographic areas, and we encourage authors, where possible and relevant, to situate their studies in comparative, transnational, or global perspectives. Books may be published in English or in French.

Series

Publication History:

A Companion

Edited by
Jack Fennell

What is Sci-Fi?

Science fiction is a non-realist genre that foregrounds a sense of material plausibility, insisting that despite seeming outlandish, it is consonant with history and the laws of nature. By turns subtle and bombastic, sci-fi revels in discovery and revelation, whether through human ingenuity or world-altering paradigm shifts. The same impulse informs both the idealism of Star Trek and the existential terror of Frankenstein.

Each chapter of this book examines a specific trope or theme through a different critical lens – including eco-criticism, feminism and historicism – while also providing a historical overview of the genre, from its disputed origins to the pulp era, the New Wave, and the exponential growth of Afrofuturism and Indigenous Futurisms. Revered masters such as Isaac Asimov, Octavia Butler and Iain M. Banks are considered alongside newer talents, including Rebecca Roanhorse, N. K. Jemisin and Kameron Hurley. Other chapters provide overviews of different media, from television (Doctor Who, Westworld) to comics/manga (2000AD, Métal Hurlant, Attack on Titan), video games (Deus Ex: Human Revolution) and theatre (Alistair McDowall’s X).

Sci-Fi: A Companion not only provides an accessible introduction to sci-fi for general readers and researchers alike, but also illuminates new approaches to a familiar genre.

Book
(Paperback)

Publication History:

notas, poemas y ejercicios 2005 – 2015

Claudia del Rio

This book is a diary derived from the careful editing of a vast series of notebooks: a complete yet diverse ensemble of investigations, lecture notes, travel diaries, poems, short fictions, summaries, and projects. Owing to the performance of her writing, the image created shows not only the life of an artist but also the way she transmits her experience, and how she conceives the current state of the arts. Between self-help and an artistic Frankenstein, this book covers ten years of atomized writing, scattered notes which have found their axis many years later. Experience is considered to be a multisensorial collage, and drawing is a modest and subtle companion, but also a powerful tool to transform reality. For the author, writing is pouring life directly into notebooks: a mobile registry which records impressions at any time, and at its own pace.